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This past weekend, family members that I don’t normally get to see were in town. Aunt Judy suggested that some of us see a movie and then get lunch together. “Do you want to go see Sully?” she asked me.

“What’s it about?” All I could think of was Monsters Inc., which didn’t sound like something Aunt Cindy would join Judy in watching.

“Oh, you know. It’s about that pilot who had birds fly into his engines so that he had to make an emergency landing on the Hudson.”

This did not sound promising. How could a feature-length film be made out of an event that presumably took fewer than five minutes? No wonder it was shorter than Florence Foster Jenkins and The Light Between Oceans. I decided to join my aunts, if only so they wouldn’t have to wait 20-40 minutes for me to finish watching a longer movie.

…so to begin with, you can tell that I either didn’t hear, or forgot, that the events of this movie actually happened my last year of undergrad. My roommate pointed out – after asking what rock I’d been under so as to miss this when it went down in 2009 – that deplaning takes several hours when the Coast Guard and police dive teams get involved.

More than that, when you’re the captain responsible, the moments feel like hours. Sully captures both the worst-case scenario – both engines out, a plane dead in the air, everyone having to utilize the exit doors, inflatable raft, and life preservers after ignoring the attendants’ safety lecture – and the best-case scenario: every single person getting off the plane intact, being taken to shore, and receiving medical attention if needed.

Also depicted:

– the people on the flight. A wheelchair-bound grandma, picking a snow globe from the gift shop for her granddaughter. An older man, his son, and the son’s friend, all of whom are desperate to get on the flight for a long-awaited golfing trip. A woman and her baby girl, sitting beside a solicitous gentleman. People who are sleeping, people who look sick, people who are excited.

– what might have been. Captain Suhlenberger, Sully for short, has episodes of imagining how it could have gone if he’d turned this way or that. He envisions distressing New York anew by crashing into another skyscraper – especially poignant to watch this past weekend.

– the real-world fallout. Did he make the right choice? Sully wonders throughout. The world hails his water landing as miraculous, while the airline and its insurance agents question whether he might have made it safely back to the runway at La Guardia, plane intact. Algorithms in plenty, as well as pilots put through a simulation, seem to indicate that he could have, and thus should have, made that turn. What, then, becomes of his career? Of his 40 years of flight? This last aspect gripped me the most, as it is entirely possible for someone to put forth the most profound effort, to remarkable results, and still be fired or vilified for it.

Despite my expectation that Sully might be an hour and a half of boredom, I was profoundly moved by its depiction of reality. Theatres are glutted with superhero movies, stuffed with explosions, full of sound and fury and signifying little.

Talking of: if you watch only one Tom Hanks movie this year, please don’t let it be Inferno.

It was good to see the collateral damage kept to a minimum for once.

It was better to see the air traffic controllers, the Coast Guard, the police divers, and other emergency response teams assemble for their work of helping, rescuing, and fixing. In a world full of accidents and mechanical failure and wicked designs, we need the reminder that such men and women are bound to serve when everything goes to hell.

It was best to see Sully taking the fate of 155 souls as seriously as a pilot ought, keeping them all as safe as possible.

On Sunday, I saw an atypical vampire movie. The weekend prior, I saw an atypical zombie movie.* Next up: atypical werewolf movie! I’ve no idea which one, though, so please comment with your suggestions, and in the meantime, let me tell you about Pontypool.

Were you to say “Hmm, you don’t strike me as a zombie movie watcher,” you would be quite correct. But Pontypool is a zombie movie the way Signs is an alien movie, which is to say that the plague-monsters themselves don’t get a lot of screen time. In an hour and a half of film, there are perhaps twelve minutes of shuffling revenants, and fewer of gore. There is neither a shotgun nor a cricket bat to be seen, and only a few splashes of red against a subdued background of bluish grays.

That said, there’s a lot to hear. The film is set in a radio broadcast studio built in the basement of an abandoned church, and most of the suspense and horror comes from what information can be gleaned from people calling in to the station, sometimes mid-attack, reporting a mob of people converging on the doctor’s office or a car being buried under a “herd” of people. Since none of it is shown, the mind is free to imagine just how awful those attacks might be. The responses and actions of announcer Grant Mazzy, his manager Sydney Briar, and assistant Laurel-Ann Drummond underscore the terror of ignorance and the slowly-dawning horror of understanding.

Even the former shock-jock is weirded out.

That creeping comprehension makes the movie. From the first two minutes, shown below, each little word is significant. The missing cat and its name; the people speaking French; the BBC broadcaster; the Valentine’s Day cards: all of it matters, and it takes watching and re-watching to understand why.

The pacing, the music (curse you, creepy violins!), the language, and silence all put the viewer in thrall. I had to talk to bring myself out of it a bit, had to eat my popcorn with determination, had to hug the friend sitting next to me whilst watching it. I’m no nail-biter, but it’s full of nail-biting tension anyway. There are those moments when one is left hollering at the screen, Don’t call him! No, hang up your phone! Such is the way of suspenseful movies: they mess with you as they draw you further in.

My housemate Cecilia and I went to see this film the other night. We did so in flagrant disregard of the Benedict Cumberbatch rule, namely “Do not watch a movie, TV episode, or miniseries for no other reason other than one actor you like is in it.” The one actor in question is, unsurprisingly, Tom Hiddleston; we’re fans of his, nor are we opposed to Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, or the rest. Sadly, none of them could save Only Lovers Left Alive from a deadly (undeadly?) slow pace.

First, the good: as a whole, the movie certainly catches a quality, a flavor. It’s dark, coppery, and not very pleasant, but it’s certainly there in Eve’s brisk walk through Tangier (the most feminine I’ve ever seen Swinton), in the grungy melancholy of Adam’s house, in the streets of Detroit. Cecilia found this depiction of Detroit rather refreshing: instead of focusing on the city as the capital of crime and corruption, the movie focuses on its musical contributions, the grittiness of its urban blight, and its hope for better things. Eve notes the importance of the lakes all around, saying “This city will rise again.” Why she doesn’t go for the original Latin, Jim Jarmusch only knows. But then, Adam is the one in residence there. Caught in the 1970s as he is, his affinity for the city indicates that both hope for better, but neither really changes.

The benefit of unending existence is the opportunity to read ALL the books.

That stagnant quality of endless days might account for the sluggish plot. This is the most charitable explanation that comes to mind: that vampires, having spent centuries of darkness watching all that the “zombies” (ie, humanity) have to show – all the art, the music, the scientific advances – are doomed to ennui, to anomie, to acedia, and (should no sunlight, contaminated blood, or immortal beloved interfere) to suicide. The story arc, such as it is, might just be one more postmodern conceit for human lives with no overarching narrative, no implicit meaning. The lack of chemistry between Adam and Eve might have been intentional, depicting the natural consequence of being married for some 200 years. Sparks, fire, fizzle, distance, regroup. They try to patch it over with allusions to quantum entanglement, Adam describing them as particles which affect each other though they be a universe apart. Perhaps Donne could make that metaphor work; this script can’t.

The less charitable and possibly more realistic explanation for the film’s torpidity is poor writing and an undeveloped plot. At some points it was like watching Catcher in the Rye but with vampires in. There are amusing moments – Adam burying his head under the pillow to avoid Eva, Eve’s iPhone calling Adam’s curious corded setup, the wrinkle of disgust that crosses Eve’s face on watching a body dissolve – but for the most part, neither Adam nor Eve compel me to care much about their undead existence or their butter-scraped-thin romance. By far the most interesting character was Eva, Eve’s younger sister. She is obnoxious, she is careless, she drinks them out of their fugue-inducing O-negative – and she somehow remains lively, as Adam and Eve do not. We left the theater wondering how she spent her time in LA, how she’d offended Adam in 1925 in Paris, what bloodletting would attend her trip back west.

Possibly devotees of artistic films would appreciate details that I missed. There are a number of overhead shots, a heavy-handed motif which attempts to connect the spinning of the stars, of records, and the eponymous lovers. Adam takes a look at all manner of classic guitars, so perhaps Gibson fanboys would be into that. Those with a dog in the fight over the author of Shakespeare’s plays might be amused when Christopher Marlowe turns up. But for my own part? Speraveram meliora. I’d hoped for better. They’re hardly lovers, and barely alive.

On Friday evening, I joined some friends to go see Star Trek: Into Darkness. On Saturday evening, I set out to see Iron Man Three. On Sunday, I did not watch any films, but found myself still searching for a word.

If you’ve seen either of these movies, or the trailers for them, or any of a hundred films similar to them, I think you will recognize the phenomenon: some explorers with tremendous firepower – or masked/unmasked heroes, or freedom fighters determined to mess things up – get in some kind of chase or brawl, and every object around is subject to be collateral damage. These fictitious cities always have a heck of a cleanup job, and we rarely, if ever, see any of it.

Their souls were drifting as the sea,
and all good towns and lands
they only saw with heavy eyes,
and broke with heavy hands.

I need a word for the distressed wince that accompanies the destruction of something fair to see, whether it be a bank, a home, a car, a spaceship, a monument.

Portmanteaus are getting me nowhere (pulcringitude? fairecoil?); attempts to find an already-existent term lost me in the wilds of TvTropes for an hour. Rereading of Eldred’s sorrow for the things that had been fair helps with quiet meditation but not with neologizing.

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